Laing, Alexander, 1903-1976

Correspondence to Lewis and Sophia Mumford from Alexander Laing and his wife, Dilys Bennett Laing.

Laing was born in Great Neck, Long Island, N.Y. in 1903, the son of Edgar Hall and Mary Adeline Laing. He was a member of Dartmouth College Class of 1925, receiving his A.B. and A.M. degrees in 1933. During the year 1925-1926 Laing worked as a technical editor of Radio news; then in 1926 he shipped as an ordinary seaman on the S.S. Leviathan to Southampton, England. In 1928 he shipped on a boat that was travelling from Newark, N.J. through the Panama Canal to the Pacific Ocean. Laing returned to Dartmouth College as a tutorial advisor in 1929, the same year he won the Walt Whitman Prize for Poetry. In 1930 he became an advisor to the arts at Dartmouth College. He left this position in 1934 when he received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to sail around the world, writing and studying the peoples of the Pacific. From 1937 to 1950 Laing was an assistant librarian in the Dartmouth College Library. He became the Director of the Public Affairs Laboratory of the Great Issues course at Dartmouth College in 1952. In 1966 he became the Educational Services Advisor at the college. Laing became a lecturer in the English department at Dartmouth College in 1965. In 1966 he became Evans Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres. He retired from Dartmouth College in 1968 and died in Hanover, N.H. in 1976.